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Lady Macbeth

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(Duncan) (Malcolm) (Donalbain) (Macbeth) (Lady Macbeth) (Banquo) (Fleance) (Macduff) (Lady Macduff) (Lennox) (Siward) (Hecate) (The Three Murderers)
A.D.D., Agree?
Macbeth's wife is a deeply ambitious woman who lusts for power and position. Early in the play she seems to be the stronger and more cruel of the two, as she urges her husband to kill King Duncan and seize the crown. After the bloodshed begins, however, Lady Macbeth falls victim to guilt and madness to an even greater severity than her husband. Her conscience affects her to such an extent that she eventually commits suicide. Interestingly, she and Macbeth are presented as being deeply in love, and many of Lady Macbeth's speeches imply that her influence over her husband is primarily sexual.
Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most famous and frightening female characters. When we first see her, she is already plotting Duncan's murder. She seems fully aware of this and knows that she will have to push Macbeth into committing murder. At one point, she wishes that she were not a woman so that she could do it herself. This theme of the relationship between gender and power is key to Lady Macbeth's character: her husband implies that she is a masculine soul inhabiting a female body, which seems to link masculinity to ambition and violence. By the close of the play, she has been reduced to sleepwalking through the castle, desperately trying to wash away an invisible bloodstain. Once the sense of guilt catches up to her, Lady Macbeth's sensitivity becomes a weakness, and she is unable to cope. In the end, she kills herself, signaling her total inability to deal with the legacy of their crimes.
The real Lady Macbeth was Gruoch, the grand-daughter of a Scottish King who was murdered. Macbeth was her second husband. Her first was a Scottish nobleman and bore a son named Lulach, who is supposedly referred to in Act 1 Scene 7 Lines 54-58, where Lady Macbeth remembers nursing a child. There is no evidence Gruoch persuaded Macbeth into taking the throne nor her influence evident in history. After Macbeth's death, Lulach ruled briefly before being killed by Malcolm. Lulach was known as 'the Simple' and some historians believe Gruoch influenced him to doing so.
Macbeth